rubyunixclipboardpbcopy

How might I pass text data from the ruby console into my clipboard without saving to a file?


I'm trying to pass the array contained in a global variable I've created into my clipboard on my mac.

It is very long so I don't want to highlight, copy & paste on my console.

I want to use embedded unix code, specificially the pbcopy function for the mac laptop console that allows me to pass text into my computers clipboard, ready to paste.

Were I to do this with a file-save, I'd do something like this (in ruby):

stringdata = “kflxkhdoudopudpdpudpudpyddoyod”
File.open("temp.txt"){|f| f.write(stringdata)}
`cat temp.txt | pbcopy`

But could I possibly do this without creating a temporary file?

I'm sure this is possible. All things in text are possible. Thanks in advance for the solution


Solution

  • You can just echo it instead if there are no newline characters in the string; otherwise, use the IO class.

    Using echo:

    system "echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy"
    

    OR

    `echo #{stringdata} | pbcopy`
    

    Ruby will then just rip the text from memory, inject it into the shell command which opens a pipe between the echo and pbcopy processes.

    Using the IO class:

    If you want to do it the Ruby way, we simply create a pipe with pbcopy using the IO class. This creates a shared files between the processes which we write to, and pbcopy will read from.

    IO.popen("pbcopy", "w") { |pipe| pipe.puts "Hello world!" }